Seeds of hope grow into a force of nature

A dangling, moon-shaped feeding device for playful cubs to cling to, allowing food to fall through its holes; a geometric structure of interconnected triangles, strung together with plastic cups cut from water bottles to hold honey; and a pair of nut-filled cylinder tubes wrapped in wool yarn and painted with paw-print patterns — these are the toys designed for moon bears, named for the crescent-shaped white marking on their chest. The toys were handmade by Chinese students aged 10 to 17 back in 2011, before they were sent to a moon bear protection center in Chengdu, Sichuan province. This center has served as a sanctuary for the creatures, also known as the Asian black bear, which is native to the region.

"With this rather primitive work for mine comes my sincere wish that the bears, who themselves had endured human cruelty, would be able to recover physically and mentally, and live in love and in peace," wrote Li Zhao, one of the students who made the toys back then, explaining her design idea on paper. She was referring to the highly controversial practice of bear-bile farming, which is primarily conducted in parts of Asia and involves extracting bile from captive bears through invasive methods.

In 2011, Li's design won first prize in a designing-for-moon bear competition, one of the organizers of which is the Beijing branch of Roots and Shoots, a youth-led community action program launched two decades earlier by the internationally renowned primatologist Jane Goodall.

"Many young people who were with us have later gone on to take leadership roles in China's ongoing effort to balance development with environmental protection," says Goodall, who's currently in Beijing, leaving on Thursday. Her groundbreaking research into chimpanzees has transformed the human perception of both apes and themselves.

Jiang Yan, 62, joined the Beijing office in 2006 and is meeting Goodall for the 10th time. "At 90, she's here to celebrate with us the China program's 30th anniversary, and to show that when one is immersed in something one truly loves, there's no such a thing as retiring," Jiang says.

One television journalist, during an interview with Goodall in the early 1970s, asked, "How long are you going to be associated with the chimpanzees?" Goodall quipped: "I should say it's a rough guess until I die, but I can't tell you how many years that will be."

No more than two hours after Goodall's arrival in Beijing around noon this past Saturday, she was in the China Science and Technology Museum collecting stories from young followers from the Roots and Shoots program who had come from all over the country.

One team that won a "Persistence Award" on Saturday hails from Qingdao, a coastal city in East China's Shandong province. Since their inception under Roots and Shoots, the team — now boasting over 1,000 members — has engaged in a wide range of projects, from mapping the region's water resources to protecting the endangered finless porpoise inhabiting the bays of China's Yellow Sea.